Official suspended in row over 'forgotten' convicts

The Home Office is expected to issue a statement today after one of its high-ranking civil servants was suspended amid the fall-out from the criminal records debacle.

The official was relieved of duties after volunteering information to an internal inquiry over the weekend.

A spokeswoman for the First Division Association (FDA) union - which only represents the service's top echelons, earning on average £55,000 - confirmed the individual, who was suspended yesterday, was one of its members.

The Home Office was expected to issue a statement today, she added.

The news diverted some scrutiny away from ministers amid growing pressure on Home Secretary John Reid and his team.

There was immediate speculation it may support his claim - and that of junior ministers Tony McNulty and Joan Ryan - not to have been alerted to the huge backlog of criminal record notifications from Europe awaiting processing.

The ministers have acknowledged that meetings were held between Home Office officials and police over problems entering data on the Police National Computer.

In a bid to quell the growing row, Mr Reid announced yesterday that he was instigating a root-and-branch review of Britain's criminal databases.

Ms Ryan will also meet EU counterparts this week to discuss improvements in systems for sharing information.

She will press for biometric details - especially fingerprints - to be included on future notifications that Britons have been convicted abroad.

Four drugs offenders and a people smuggler convicted in the EU have so far been confirmed as having passed Criminal Records Bureau checks to work with children and vulnerable adults in Britain - but apparently no violent or sexual offenders were given a clean bill of health.

There were claims that two of the men convicted of serious offences in Europe went on to kill here - although the Home Office insisted police knew of their background and it would have made no difference to the way they were dealt with.

According to the Observer, 43-year-old Dale Miller's offences committed abroad during the 1990s were not entered on the Police National Computer until shortly before he was sentenced to 16 years' jail for manslaughter in Newcastle in 2002.

Sky News reported that another convicted participant in the killing, 36-year-old Lee Watson, had also committed offences on the continent that were not recorded.

A Home Office spokesman said it was "incorrect" that Miller would have been supervised by probation officers if his records had been stored electronically earlier, due to changes in monitoring rules over time.

"Dale Miller has had a criminal record on the PNC since 1982. He was and is a long-time serious criminal well known to the police throughout that period."

"Miller's foreign record has been on the PNC since 1992, concerning an offence in Switzerland, his record on the PNC was updated in 1996, in 1998 and was last updated in 2001," the spokeswoman added.

Meanwhile, the probation officers' union, Napo, estimated that at least 80 of the 540 people who had committed serious crimes in Europe had since reoffended.

A spokesman for Mr Reid said he was writing to Cabinet colleagues to get agreement for a review of British databases for receiving information about criminality, and how information was recorded between them.

The probe would also cover systems for exchange of data between the UK and other countries, and who was responsible for handling and acting on that information here, according to the spokesman.

Ms Ryan will raise the issue of sharing records at a meeting of EU home affairs ministers in Dresden, Germany, which begins today.Shadow home secretary David Davis described the review of databases as a "desperate piece of news management".

"This should have been done on day one, not announced when it was expedient to do so in order to try and get a good headline.

"While files lay unopened in Acpo, it is clear that the Home Office are more concerned with trying to manage the media than manage the problem."